Co-op, in-game purchases, action rolls and cover are all hot topics when it comes to Dead Space 3, but no one has really stopped to look at what's driving the overall narrative of Visceral's space-horror opus: Isaac Clark.

After everything he's gone through in the past two games and all the events in between, it's hard to argue that he wouldn't be more hardened; a more resilient version of the voiceless, hapless vessel we embodied in the first game. We broached this idea in a recent interview with Senior Producer, Dave Woldman, asking about Isaac's growth as a person and a victim, and just how the team is tackling that in the third installment of Dead Space.

"It’s one of those interesting things. Because when Dead Space began, he was an everyman engineer thrust into crazy situations," Woldman explains.

"And by growing the character over time, you have to say “Is his reaction to these scenarios plausible? Is there something he’s doing that makes sense?”. And having gone through it all once, it just wouldn’t make a lot of sense, if in the third game, he’s still saying “What’s going on over here? What’s the cause of this?”.

"To anyone who is familiar with our franchise --and our fans, love it and eat it up-- it just wouldn’t make any sense, and they’d be scratching their heads and say “Your story is comical”. Clearly, there’s a Necromorph there, and he’s going to know what to do this time around. He is a reluctant hero; he was thrust into it initially. In Dead Space 2, he was brought on... he was thrust into it in Dead Space 1, pulled into it in Dead Space 2, and then in Dead Space 3, it’s continuing."

Yeah it's sort of weird at the start of DS2, he's reacting to people getting murdered by necros, recoiling and groaning in cutscenes... then it's just straight back to unflinchingly mowing down every necro in sight..

What game isn't like that though, there's always a disconnect between the narrative and how the character does things while you're actually playing - especially noticeable in scenes where after killing 500 guys in a row a random mook gets the drop on you and you are captured in a cut scene.